The Altar Steps eBook

These were all stories that made bedtime sweet, stories
to remember and brood upon gratefully in the darkness
of the night when he lay awake and when, alas, other
stories less pleasant to recall would obtrude themselves.

Mark was not brought up luxuriously in the Lima Street
Mission House, and the scarcity of toys stimulated
his imagination. All his toys were old and broken,
because he was only allowed to have the toys left over
at the annual Christmas Tree in the Mission Hall; and
since even the best of toys on that tree were the
cast-offs of rich little children whose parents performed
a vicarious act of charity in presenting them to the
poor, it may be understood that Mark’s share
of these was not calculated to spoil him. His
most conspicuous toy was a box of mutilated grenadiers,
whose stands had been melted by their former owner
in the first rapture of discovering that lead melts
in fire and who in consequence were only able to stand
up uncertainly when stuck into sliced corks.

Luckily Mark had better armies of his own in the coloured
lines that crossed the blankets of his bed. There
marched the crimson army of St. George, the blue army
of St. Andrew, the green army of St. Patrick, the
yellow army of St. David, the rich sunset-hued army
of St. Denis, the striped armies of St. Anthony and
St. James. When he lay awake in the golden light
of the morning, as golden in Lima Street as anywhere
else, he felt ineffably protected by the Seven Champions
of Christendom; and sometimes even at night he was
able to think that with their bright battalions they
were still marching past. He used to lie awake,
listening to the sparrows and wondering what the country
was like and most of all the sea. His father
would not let him go into the country until he was
considered old enough to go with one of the annual
school treats. His mother told him that the country
in Cornwall was infinitely more beautiful than Kensington
Gardens, and that compared with the sea the Serpentine
was nothing at all. The sea! He had heard
it once in a prickly shell, and it had sounded beautiful.
As for the country he had read a story by Mrs. Ewing
called Our Field, and if the country was the
tiniest part as wonderful as that, well . . . meanwhile
Dora brought him back from the greengrocer’s
a pot of musk, which Mark used to sniff so enthusiastically
that Dora said he would sniff it right away if he
wasn’t careful. Later on when Lima Street
was fetid in the August sun he gave this pot of musk
to a little girl with a broken leg, and when she died
in September her mother put it on her grave.